


all burnt up, no resurrection

by Liberalia



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Kinda, Open Ending, Pyrrhic Victory, Sort Of, Suicidal Ideation, The Master wins, Unhappy Ending, dark!Doctor, heavily implied sexual content, in the sense of hoping someone will kill you, no beta we die like time lords, that last scene with the Master in Timeless Children but make it Worse, the glimmer is probably an oncoming train, they’re both broken in different ways, this is basically just misery I’m afraid, with a faint glimmer of light in the distance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26595436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liberalia/pseuds/Liberalia
Summary: “I’m…done, finished. It’s over. You’ve won.” She smiled faintly. It didn’t reach her eyes.“Congratulations.”The Master has won at last. Now he has to deal with the consequences.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 40





	all burnt up, no resurrection

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically: ‘What if the Master did break the Doctor? And then actually had to face the fact that he has Fucked Up Bad?’ 
> 
> Also the Classic series leant heavily on the idea that immortality is basically unendurable and will destroy you, and this is very much in that vein.
> 
> Beware that it is also misery porn, so read with caution.
> 
> Title from 'This Hollow World' by Johnny Hollow.

The Doctor moved closer, and he flinched back a little from the look in her eyes.

“No, Master. You don’t understand. I don’t care anymore. Go away. Stay here. Do whatever you want.” She didn’t sound angry, just - quiet. Flat.

“I’m…done, finished. It’s over. You’ve won.” She smiled faintly. It didn’t reach her eyes.

“Congratulations.”

No, no, nonono, she was supposed to be angry, angry enough to…

“I’ll rule the universe,” he said. Trying to sound like he still cared.

Nothing. “Destroy everything. Kill everyone.” She just looked at him.

Please care. Please. Enough to kill me at least.

Her hand dipped into her pocket, pulled out the Death Particle strapped to an explosive. His vision blurred a little with relief. The Cyberium seethed. (Danger, danger. Take evasive action.) He held himself still by main force, anticipating. It would all be over soon.

“This is yours.”

She held the bomb out to him. When he only stared, uncomprehending, she let it fall to the floor with a loud clatter.

“For me? You shouldn’t have. I’ll-“ He swallowed, dry. “I’ll only use it on you.”

“What’s the point? You won’t kill me.” Certain. A statement about the nature of the world.

“I’m going now,” she said, turning as she spoke. He lurched forward and grabbed her arm, staying her. Desperate. (You can’t leave me here.)

“I could - lock you up, it is my turn, after all,” he suggested, trying to inject some bravado into his voice. Failing.

“You shouldn’t,” she said, voice calm and empty. She glanced down at his hand where it clutched her sleeve, and he let go.

The sound of her feet crunching through the rubble faded quickly. He wasn’t sure why he was surprised at how quiet it was afterwards.

***

He ripped the remains of ~~their~~ his people apart and created them anew.

***

It took a while to find her - almost a year. She wasn’t doing any of the things he usually used to track her. No daring rescues, no companions pulled out of their normal time stream.

He made the usual threats against the planet they were on, the city nearby, and she looked at him as if he was very, very far away.

“They’re all going to die soon anyway, Master.”

He ordered the destruction, and got distracted by the chaos - it did help, a little. Made him feel - something.

It was a good half-hour before he realised that she’d left without trying to stop him.

He does try again, of course. A few more times. She never really paid any attention, not to him or to the death around them.

***

The main hold he always had over the Doctor, the weakness he could consistently exploit, was her ridiculous devotion to every sentient - and sometimes non-sentient - being that tripped across her path, no matter how useless. Now it was gone, and by his own efforts, no less. It felt like he was scrabbling at the side of a cliff, handholds scraping away under his fingers. Waiting to finish his fall into the depths.

He had been frightened of the Doctor before, but never quite like this.

***

After that, he didn’t dare try and do anything to the Earth. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to see what the Doctor’s anger would look like right now.

In truth, it was because if he did destroy it and she looked as she had on Gallifrey, on those other planets, as if it didn’t matter and never had… He hadn’t thought he could crack further under his own weight, but he thought that might manage it.

***

Eventually, he tracked her down again. He couldn’t begin to explain to himself why.

She sat on a rock overlooking the water, which was an unsettling shade of green. He smelled sulphuric acid.

“Nice day,” he said, sitting beside her. The light from the dwarf sun slanted red across the steaming waves.

This planet was nameless and empty, not just of sentient life, but of life at all. No-one to see them. Nothing to kill.

“S’pose.”

After a few minutes of silence, desperately wanting _something_ to happen even if it was awful, he put a fingertip on her jaw, and trailing it down her neck while she sat like a stone. Traced her collarbone, and came to rest in the hollow of her throat, feeling her pulses beat under the fine skin. Reminding himself that she was alive, despite the grey silence of her mind.

She turned to face him, jerky, too-fast. He froze, waiting for the blow.

She could probably finish this just by pushing him into that water.

“Fine,” she said after a moment. “Why not?” And kissed him, one hand cold on the back of his neck. It was as stupidly good as always, that much hadn’t changed, and he heard himself make a humiliating sound into her mouth, clutching at her.

She pulled back and raised her eyes to his. He looked, and it was like staring down into a mineshaft, over the edge of a cliff. The same sick, dizzying drop in his belly. He shuddered a little, only just managing not to recoil. Eternity had always unsettled him.

She rose to her feet, sliding easily out of his loosened grasp and walking away. “Are you coming,” she asked without inflection, not slowing or looking back.

He shut his eyes for a moment and breathed.

Longing won out over good sense, and he followed her up the hill.

It said something about his current state of mind that it wasn’t until she opened the door in the large rock at the top and walked in to a stark white control room that he realised what was wrong.

He said, careful, “This isn’t your Tardis.”

She opened a door with a blaster burn on it across the room, revealing a blandly decorated bedroom, and replied, taking off her coat (now badly singed at one hem).

“It is now.”

He could leave (should leave, the Cyberium hissed at the back of his mind), could return to hollow conquest, to the smell of smoke that never seemed wash out of his clothes.

Instead he followed her to the bed.

It was slightly horrifying how much he could still enjoy it. Despite his own irrational fear (what was he even frightened of? The worst had already happened), despite the way the emptiness radiating off her made it more like being with a shell of the Doctor than the real thing.

Perhaps that was more to do with his lack of enjoyment of his life as it stood than anything they did together. And at least she still reacted a little to this.

***

While he dressed, he asked about the damage to her coat. After a pause in which she seemed to dredge up the words, she said, “The Judoon came to arrest me.”

“Aha.” He should leave it there. “How are they now?”

She blinked. Shrugged. “In the Time Vortex.”

“Right.”

She returned to staring at the ceiling, and after a few breaths, he left. There were planets as yet unburnt, after all.

***

He only really moved now when the frustrated screaming of the Cyberium (it really hadn’t picked the right candidate, had it) at the back of his head grew unbearable, or to find her.

She never sought him out, or seemed surprised to see him. He never saw her around people, not even when he waited and watched her for a while before approaching.

After a while, he stopped trying to shield his thoughts and emotions from her. She never showed any interest, anyway.

***

He had wanted to humble the Doctor, to crush her, for so long, so desperately and apparently unattainably, that he hadn’t thought much about what the Doctor, once crushed, would actually be like to be around. Whether any of the things that he valued in her would actually survive. How much of a pyrrhic victory it might turn out to be.

He really had won at last. All he’d had to do, it seemed, was destroy everything he had ever wanted.

***

Once, he came upon her walking away from a smoking Dalek camp.

“A gun.”

“Mmm.”

“You never liked those.”

“I used them before.” He startled a little at the direct reference to her lives before this one. It hadn’t come up. Although that was probably because this was the most they’d talked for a while.

“I killed a lot of people without guns, anyway. Seemed stupid to fuss about how I did it, really.”

“Doctor…” he trailed off.

I’m sorry, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say.

“What?” She asked, something closer to emotion than he’d heard from her since Gallifrey slipping into her voice.

“ _Worried_ about me?”

She seemed slightly more alive, an angry light in her eyes. If he pushed her, she might wake up a little more. Take an interest in things again.

If he pushed her, she might shoot him and leave him to regenerate in agony.

“No.”

The hint of feeling, expression, disappeared from her face.

“That’s what I thought.”

She returned to not-her-Tardis, and he followed her.

He didn’t have anything better to do, after all.

***

“You’re going to die,” she informed him later, hand gripping his neck, fingers on his pulses. He briefly hoped she would squeeze, but she pulled away.

“I can’t, you know.”

“I know.”

"The Death Particle wouldn’t have worked, not for me.”

“I know,” he sighed, though in truth he’d hoped otherwise.

“Everything dies, everything rusts… I told Rassilon, before I put him in that tomb. He didn’t understand, not really. Never quite immortal, not down in the bones. He was so fixated on keeping it going that he was going to spoil everything…I shouldn’t have bothered. It was all the same in the end. They-”

She stopped, breathed. “Met some Eternals, a little while ago. At least they had each other.”

He cannot even claim to be the one that broke her, it seems. He reminded her that it had already happened, that was all.

Another pause. “It was nice, forgetting for a while. I liked it better. Even if it was a lie.”

“Oh.”

She almost brightened. “I could do it again.”

He could have her back; undo all this. But-. No.

“You'd have to get rid of everything. No reminders, or it would fail.” Say no. Think of something.

She put forward what he thought was probably an immense effort. Looked him in the eye, hand on his face.

“I really did love you, you know?” It was an answer. Kinder than he deserved.

“I know.” He could not make his voice as empty as hers.

“I’ll wait,” she promised. “It won’t be all that long. Not to me.”

“I’d stay away,” he said, clutching her arm, pleading. “I wouldn’t risk reminding you.”

It was, probably, a lie.

( _I want to see you be yourself again before I die. I liked the lie better, too._ )

“I’ll wait," she said, stroking his hair away from his face. She could afford to be kind now. She had a way out, after all.

“I’ll wait.”

**Author's Note:**

> So! I promise I am in the middle of writing something a: much longer, b: better edited, and c: more enjoyable/happy (and smutty) than this, but I sort of purged all the angst into this one?


End file.
